Bennett's World
Staff -- School Library Journal, 4/1/2000
Bennett Haselton is founder of peacefire.org, a Web site that provides people 18 and under with handy instructions on how to circumvent filtering software. What do teenagers need to know about the Internet? I think it's important to realize that the so-called adult Web sites are not as dangerous as some politicians and software companies would have you believe. I think that teenagers should grasp the fact of how ludicrous it is that people are saying Web sites are so dangerous that you need to sacrifice some of [your First Amendment] rights to be "protected" from them. Your site features a "Blocked Site of the Day." A couple of days ago, for example, it was the Vatican's. What's the most ridiculous example of a site that has been censored by filtering software? The all-time record would probably be Time magazine's. We know exactly why it happened. It was because they published an article talking negatively about CYBERsitter's blocking policies, and CYBERsitter found the article...on pathfinder.com, which is Time magazine's Web site. [The site] was blocked for awhile after that. A reporter from Time saw that and wrote another article for their Web site about how Time magazine got blocked after they published the [original] article on CYBERsitter.
